Mary Malone's Dust Research
The solitary physicist who decoded the language of consciousness across worlds.
Dr Mary Malone is a physicist from Will's world, and a former nun, who investigates dark matter, which she refers to as 'Shadows' or 'Shadow particles'. In The Subtle Knife, Lyra visits her on the advice of the alethiometer and realises that dark matter corresponds with what she knows as Dust. The name 'Shadows' was given to the particles by her colleague Oliver Payne, in reference to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
Quick Facts
- Character
- Mary Malone
- Role
- Physicist and Dust Researcher
Lore & Background
Mary has a computer that can communicate with dark matter: a program that, paired with a detector, communicates with Dust by typed questions. When she communicates with the Shadows, they confirm that they are the same as Dust and dark matter. Sir Charles Latrom offers to fund her research if she will follow his directions, and she refuses. The particles instruct her to destroy the computer and to travel through the window between worlds used by Will and Lyra, explaining that her role is to 'play the serpent'.
Reader's Guide
Mary eventually arrives in the world of the mulefa. There she builds the amber spyglass, which allows her to see Dust, and investigates the death of the trees that are essential to the mulefa. She discovers that the Dust is no longer falling from the sky to pollinate the trees but is flowing sideways, streaming rapidly away. Later Mary uses I Ching divination, which Lyra confirms to be a method of communicating with Dust. At the end of The Amber Spyglass, Serafina Pekkala shows her how to see her own dæmon, which takes the form of an Alpine chough.
More in Narrative Arcs & Timeline
Elsewhere in His Dark Materials
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